
Class Dl 

Book X 

Copyrights? 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



Jesus of Nazareth 

in the 

Light of Today 



By 

Elbert Russell 

Professor in Eartham College 
Author of " The Parables of Jesus'* 



The John C. Winston Company 

PHILADELPHIA 



^ l&a 






Copyright, 1909, by 
The John C. Winston Co. 



CO! .A259953 



I 1 



r- 



i 



INTRODUCTION. 

The assertion in Hebrews that 
"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, 
to-day and forever" is true of his 
historical character and of his minis- 
try to the needs of men. Thru the 
changing centuries he has come, the 
unchanging Christ, scattering "the 
charities that soothe, and heal, and 
bless" at the feet of men; giving 
peace to the sin-troubled, purity to 
the defiled, overcoming power to men 
fighting feebly against temptation, 
and an absorbing purpose to aimless 
lives. 

Yet the history of Christian art 
and theology shows that each age has, 

3 



INTRODUCTION 

in a sense, a different Christ for its 
own. Each appreciates him as he 
ministers to its peculiar needs; each 
paints him as it sees him thru its own 
atmosphere, and interprets him in 
terms of its philosophy. 

This booh, like the lecture of which 
it is an enlargement, is an essay 
towards the portrait of the twentieth 
century Christ; an effort to show 
Jesus in his saving truth and power 
to those who may be alienated from 
the Christ of past generations. 

Credit has been given wherever I 
have consciously used other men's 
thoughts, but it is impossible even to 
name the many writers and teachers 
to whom my thanks are due for help 
toward an appreciation of Jesus of 
Nazareth 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The New Point of View 7 

II. The Religious Genius 12 

III. The Originality of His Methods... 17 

IV. The Reality of Spiritual Conquest. 21 
V. Kingdoms Founded on the Unseen . . 25 

VI. The Survival of the True 30 

VII. The Universal Family 33 

VIII. The Historical Basis in the Family 

of Israel 38 

IX. The Ability to Convince 44 

X. The Satisfaction of Permanent 

Human Needs 48 

XI. The Height of the Pedestal 59 

XII. The Measure of a Man 67 

XIII. The Name Above Every Name 74 

XIV. Pitted Against the Rabbis 78 

XV. The Poise of His Character 89 

XVI. His Power to Touch the Conscience. 98 
XVII. The Cosmic Meaning of His Char- 
acter 102 

XVIII. The Secret of His Power 107 



Jesus of Nazareth 

In the Light of To-day 



CHAPTER I. 

THE NEW POINT OF VIEW. 

Jesus of Nazareth challenged the 
men of his time to an opinion about 
him. Not only by his application of 
Messianic prophecies to himself and 
by the implied claims of his triumphal 
entry, but in express words he pressed 
upon the people the question, "Whom 
say ye that I am? What think ye 
of the Christ?" These questions his 
contemporaries answered from the 
standpoint of their age according to 
their knowledge of Jesus and their 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

attitude toward him. The changes 
of nineteen centuries, however, make 
it impossible for us to adopt their 
answers without criticism or revision. 
Since the sixteenth century, espe- 
cially, the knowledge and opinions of 
the western world have undergone so 
great changes, that the world we live 
in is, to our thought, very different 
from that in which the men of the 
first century lived. This change, 
which was most rapid in the last half 
of the nineteenth century, was pro- 
duced chiefly by the new historical 
and scientific spirit and methods, and 
by the general acceptance of the 
theory of evolution. Modern his- 
torical inquiry has given new stand- 
ards of historical probability and 
changed the world's judgment in 
many things as to the course of 
human events. The new scientific 
method has not only freed men's 
5 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

minds from the Medieval supersti- 
tions, but has created a new sense of 
God's ways in the world and new con- 
ceptions of the laws of spiritual 
things. These forces have pro- 
foundly influenced religious thought. 
Many religious opinions once unques- 
tioned are no longer tenable by the 
modern mind; not so much because 
men have been convinced by formal 
argument that they are false, as that 
they no longer appear true from the 
new point of view; that they do not 
fit in with the world of reality as seen 
in the light of to-day. 

It is in this light that we are led to 
re-examine the character and claims 
of Jesus. Let us face the question 
frankly : The twentieth century man, 
who is in harmony with the historical 
and scientific spirit, who thinks in 
terms of the evolutionary philosophy, 
who presupposes the commonly 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

accepted results of the historical and 
literary criticism of the Bible, espe- 
cially of the Gospels, — what shall he 
think of Jesus of Nazareth? Let us 
attempt to form an estimate of his 
character and importance as a force 
in history in the same spirit and by 
the same methods by which we would 
attempt to estimate the significance 
of any other historical personage, 
such as Napoleon or Hannibal, Bud- 
dha or Mohammed. 

We may not avoid such an inquiry 
by the plea that we lack special quali- 
fications as philosophers and critical 
historians. The common attitude to 
Jesus of Nazareth must spring from 
the opinions of common men and 
women like ourselves, — men and 
women who are compelled to form 
the opinions we live by without spec- 
ial qualifications, philosophical or 
critical. In fulfilling this duty the 

10 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

specialists in various lines of thought 
give us indispensable aid, but in the 
last analysis we cannot escape the 
responsibility of forming our own 
opinions as to the attitude we ought 
to take toward Jesus of Nazareth, 
and what place we shall give him 
among the forces to which we open 
our lives. A proper sense of the 
limitations of our knowledge will 
keep us humble and teachable; but 
the human mind, limited and fallible 
as it is, is the only knowing and think- 
ing organ we possess, and we are 
under obligations to do the best we 
can with it. After using every 
means to get at the truth, we honor 
our Maker best by living up to what 
the instruments he has given us show 
us of truth and duty; for we must 
live by what appears true rather than 
by what seems to be false. 



11 



CHAPTER II. 

THE RELIGIOUS GENIUS. 

According to common classifica- 
tions of men, we should call Jesus a 
religious genius. Religious matters 
were from his early youth his absorb- 
ing interest ; religious perfection was 
the passion of his life; and the spir- 
itual relations of men occupied him 
wholly as a teacher. His earliest 
recorded utterance shows that even 
before his maturity he had shown an 
absorbing interest in matters relig- 
ious. When, on the occasion of a 
visit to Jerusalem at twelve years of 
age, Joseph and Mary, after a long 
search, found him at last in the tem- 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

pie, he expressed surprise that their 
previous knowledge of his ways and 
interests had not led them to seek him 
first of all in the temple: "Why did 
ye seek me?" he asked, "Did ye not 
know that I must be in my Father's 
house?" 

Jesus urged other men to enter 
into a relation of perfect obedience 
with God, but he claimed always to 
have known this relation himself. 
He exhorted other men to repent of 
their sins as the only way to enter 
the kingdom of God, but no words 
of repentance ever fell from his own 
lips. He claimed to live in perfect 
unity with God. He challenged 
men to convict him of sin. This 
claim, however, is not the unique 
thing about him. It is not unknown 
for men thru religious fanaticism or 
insanity to claim to be sinless; but it 
is difficult to get those who know 

13 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

them best to allow the claim. If no 
man is a hero to his valet, it is because 
the valet sees him in those hours when 
he drops the heroic role. Now and 
then a man may persuade enthusiastic 
followers, who never see him except 
when he is made up for the character 
and acting the part, that he is a saint ; 
but it is more difficult to get his wife, 
children and servants, who know him 
when he is off guard, w r earied and 
vexed with trifles, to believe in his 
perfection. The marvel about Jesus 
is that they who knew him best are 
they who published his claim to sin- 
lessness as true. It was first of all 
the circle of his closest disciples and 
immediate family, — those who saw 
him weary, sleepy, hungry, harassed 
with life's petty cares, and the victim 
of petty malice, who believed that he 
did always the things pleasing to 
God. 

14 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

He saw and interpreted life in 
terms of spiritual relations. To him 
the world was the Father's house. 
In the sunrise and the falling rain, in 
the springing grass, the glory of the 
lily and the feeding birds he saw the 
impartial benevolence of God. To 
him the whole range and process of 
life, — sowing and reaping, making of 
bread and giving of feasts, care of 
sheep, fishing, trading, travelling, 
building, and ruling, — was a parable 
and revelation of the spiritual laws 
and forces that underlie and give 
meaning to the visible world. At 
his baptism he became assured that he 
was the expected Messiah of the 
Jews, sent of God to bring deliver- 
ance to his people and to found the 
kingdom of God on earth. But he 
held that the deliverance the nation 
needed was not political freedom 
from Rome, nor military mastery 

15 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

over the Gentiles; but to be freed 
from sin and all selfishness; to be 
released from greed, bestiality, envy 
and cruelty; to be made kind and 
helpful to all men, and trustful and 
obedient toward God. His task he 
conceived to be the bringing in of a 
kingdom that was not outward, but 
the essence of which was for God's 
will to be done on earth as it is in 
heaven. 



16 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ORIGINALITY OF HIS 
METHODS. 

We have seen something of the 
originality of Jesus' character and 
point of view. They prepare us for 
the originality of his methods. At 
the outset he was confronted with 
temptations to take an unspiritual 
view of his work. Popular patriot- 
ism demanded political independence 
thru a successful war, and a splendid 
government like that of David and 
Solomon. It was expected that the 
Messiah would bring immunity from 
toil for daily bread. It is written 
in the Apocalypse of Baruch that in 

17 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

Messiah's time so great would be the 
fertility of Palestine's limestone hills 
that every vine would bear a thousand 
clusters, and every cluster a thousand 
grapes, and every grape would yield 
a keg of wine. The ecclesiastical 
leaders expected the Messiah to 
usher in an age of miraculous por- 
tents to satisfy the people's love of 
the marvelous and to give proof of 
his divine appointment. "Signs and 
bread" was the Jewish equivalent of 
the demand of the idle Roman popu- 
lace for "bread and circuses." By 
feeding and amusing the populace, 
the "lords of the Gentiles" were 
enabled to keep their dominion; and 
if Jesus had yielded to the expecta- 
tions of his people, if he had turned 
the stones of Palestine into bread for 
them, and had entertained them by 
such marvels as leaping from the roof 
of the temple into the Kedron valley 

18 



JESUS OF NAZAEETH 

and returning unharmed, borne up 
by angels, they would have been his 
servants. But Jesus placed no reli- 
ance on such means. Man he knew 
to be something other than an animal 
to be glutted with food, something 
more than a child to be amused with 
strange trifles. Nor was Jesus 
deceived by the lesson that the "king- 
doms of the world" seemed to teach* 
Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, 
Alexander and Caesar had each won 
world-empire by the sword. To 
adopt their method seemed the only 
feasible way to win the world to him- 
self and God. Before such a temp- 
tation to sacrifice everything for the 
sake of easy, immediate, visible 
results, Mohammed afterwards fell. 
After he had tried the slow method 
of teaching the truth as he saw it, 
for ten years, he gave up reliance on 
the power of truth and took to the 

19 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

sword. Before this temptation the 
Medieval Church fell, when it aban- 
doned the attempt to convince men 
of the truth of its doctrines by the 
logic of argument and experience, 
and resorted to the sword and fagot 
to win and hold its power. But here 
Jesus did not fall. His originality 
lies in his rejection of all outward 
forces and his reliance on the power 
of truth and self-sacrificing love to 
win the world. But was it the origi- 
nality of inspiration or the eccen- 
tricity of a madman? 



00 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE REALITY OF SPIR- 
ITUAL CONQUEST. 

In order to judge of the character 
of Jesus' originality, we must ascer- 
tain whether it be true to human 
nature. Modern historical study has 
enabled us to distinguish between 
military conquest and spiritual con- 
quest. Sometimes the two go 
together, and in such cases it is diffi- 
cult to distinguish them, but they are 
not identical and do not necessarily 
go together. The ancient Assyrians 
furnish an example of military unac- 
companied by spiritual conquest. 
Their military prowess has rarely 
n 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

been surpassed. During the cen- 
turies of their power they were uni- 
formly successful as besiegers and 
conquerors, but they were unable to 
reconcile their subjects to their 
dominion or win them to Assyrian 
ideals. Whenever an Assyrian king 
died, the empire dissolved into its con- 
stituent peoples, and tho for centuries 
each succeeding monarch was able 
to defeat the rebels and bring them 
again under the yoke, they could 
never assuage the hate of their sub- 
ject races. They only succeeded in 
rendering it impotent by deporting 
and mixing peoples wholesale, so as 
to kill their national feelings and 
aspirations. Even then these rem- 
nants never became loyal to the 
Assyrian government. Contrast with 
this, Alexander's conquest of the 
Persian empire. He not only 
defeated the orientals in battle, but 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

so enthused them with loyalty to his 
own ideals of a world-empire and 
with love of the Hellenic culture that 
he represented, that when his Greek 
troops mutinied and demanded to be 
led back to Greece, he was able to 
quell them by the aid of the Persian 
troops whom he had won to his ideals 
and inspired with loyalty to his per- 
son, after he had beaten them in bat- 
tle. In this case spiritual conquest 
accompanied military conquest. But 
history tells us of military con- 
querors who have in turn been con- 
quered by the spiritual forces of the 
defeated race. It is a commonplace 
of history how the Romans went to 
school to the Greeks after they had 
subdued the Hellenic states by force 
of arms ; how they learned language, 
philosophy, and art, sitting at the feet 
of slaves and bowing to the spiritual 
authority of their subjects. Like- 

93 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

wise when the Germanic tribes had 
overthrown the Roman empire, so 
great was their reverence for the 
religion, culture, and ideals of justice 
of Roman civilization, that they sub- 
jected themselves to the spiritual 
power of Rome, binding thereto both 
mind and conscience for the thou- 
sand years of the Middle Age. No 
lesson of history is clearer than that 
they who take the sword and rely 
upon it alone, perish by the sword. 
The only permanent conquests are 
those made in the realm of the spirit 
by love, truth or justice; and it was 
by these, without the confusion and 
hindrances which armies always intro- 
duce into the process, that Jesus 
sought to conquer the world. 



CHAPTER V. 

KINGDOMS FOUNDED ON 

THE UNSEEN. 

The ultimate basis of all social 
organizations is spiritual. Not only 
the kingdom of God but the king- 
doms of the world are within men, 
resting on inward foundations. It 
is sometimes asserted that the ulti- 
mate appeal of government is to mili- 
tary or other forms of physical force. 
This is never true. The ultimate 
appeal of governments is to the 
loyalty of their citizens, or at least to 
the loyalty of the military or some 
other powerful section of the citizen- 
ship. A few years ago when Russia 

25 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

seemed in the midst of a revolu- 
tion the crucial question finally be- 
came whether the army would remain 
loyal. Because the Cossacks re- 
mained true to the house of Roman- 
off, the Russian autocracy remains. 
Napoleon could conquer Europe 
with his legions only after he had 
won them by other than physical 
force to fight for him. If by the 
magnetism of his personality and the 
spell of his genius Napoleon could 
get a half -million men to follow him 
even to death, why should it be 
unthinkable that Jesus should get the 
world by similar means to become 
and remain subjects of his kingdom? 
Such were the foundations Jesus 
laid for his kingdom, and he would 
not seek to augment his power, nor 
risk its stability by assuming the out- 
ward forms and buttresses of king- 
ship. In a hereditary monarchy, the 

26 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

hereditary king may be lacking in 
kingly qualities, so that he needs the 
paraphernalia of royalty to hide 
his lack of kingly person and char- 
acter, and to secure that homage and 
obedience which men yield to the 
ideal of order and justice for which 
the throne and scepter stand, but 
which his person could not inspire. 
But the true kingly person does not 
need such aids and disguises, and so 
Jesus sought to become king of men, 
without robe or crown, throne or 
scepter, by the sheer force of his per- 
sonality, by the convincing power of 
his teaching and the winning power 
of his love. By such means would he 
win his kingdom and on such a basis 
let it rest. It was his trust in the suf- 
ficiency of these that made him seem 
so utterly careless of the future of 
his movement. He neglected the 
ordinary means on which men rely to 

37 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

propagate or buttress a cause. He 
wrote no book, accumulated no 
wealth, formed no government, 
organized no church. He came to 
cast fire upon the earth and needed 
nothing more after it had kindled. 
Against the world's hoary bulwarks 
of evil he set the blazing passion of 
his cross, and having seen the flame 
kindle in his disciples, he went his 
way sure that he had overcome the 
world. He planted his kingdom as 
seed and leaven in the hearts of men, 
confident of the vital power of its 
truth and love to grow and fructify 
in the soil of humanity, assured that 
it would permeate and transform the 
world. The power of an idea, or a 
resolution, or a passion to make his- 
tory and to change and determine 
destiny is a commonplace of our 
thinking to-day, but with Jesus it was 
the daring of genius, the insight of 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

inspiration. Thus we reach one 
measure of the greatness of Jesus, as 
we see how far he surpassed his con- 
temporaries in insight, and realize 
how great was the faith required to 
adopt such a plan in the face of the 
world's skepticism and hostility; how 
iaring the courage to hold it fast even 
in the seeming failure of the end. 



99 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE SURVIVAL OF THE 
TRUE. 

Let us now consider Jesus' teach- 
ing. It was as a teacher that he was 
most commonly known and it was 
thru his teaching mainly that he 
sought to accomplish his work. We 
may apply to his teaching the test of 
survival. The doctrine of the sur- 
vival of the fittest means, in a general 
way, that the organisms, which are 
best fitted to meet the conditions 
imposed upon them by their environ- 
ment, will survive and perpetuate 
themselves. In this way survival 
becomes a test of truth, in so far as 

30 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

by truth we mean conformity to the 
conditions under which an organism 
exists. There are many things, for 
example, that limit the possibility of 
growing apple-trees successfully in 
our country. The varieties that sur- 
vive are those that are able to with- 
stand our severe winters, dry sum- 
mers, and numerous insect pests. 
Varieties that are not able to resist 
these successfully die out. Conse- 
quently the fact that a given variety 
of apple is successfully grown here 
is proof of its adjustment to these 
conditions. The buck's horn, to take 
another illustration, is a weed that 
thrives in the clover fields, because of 
its admirable fitness for life under the 
conditions found there. It grows 
about the height of the clover, and 
springs and seeds as quickly after 
mowing. Its seed is so near the 
color, size and weight of the clover- 
si 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

seed that it is nearly impossible to 
pick, screen, or blow it out. Turn- 
ing to forms of human society we 
may apply the same principles, for 
forms of human society follow the 
laws of organic life. That form of 
human society, whether economic, 
political, or religious, will last longest 
and be most vigorous, which is most 
in accord with the deep and abiding 
traits of human nature and with the 
spiritual and moral laws of the world. 
That organization will be most last- 
ing which is based on the forces that 
are most powerful to move and hold 
men. Consequently we may apply 
to Jesus' teaching concerning the 
kingdom of God the test of survival, 
and by this means determine whether 
it be true to spiritual realities. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE UNIVERSAL FAMILY. 

Jesus taught that in the family at 
its best are found the truest relations 
of human beings to each other, — 
truest to their best nature and most 
permanent needs; for when we 
examine his teaching carefully, his 
kingdom of God turns out to be a 
universal family. God stands to its 
members as their Father. Men are 
to act toward God as sons, and 
toward each other as brothers. The 
motives that rule in his kingdom are 
those of the family stript of its 
limitations of kin and blood: perfect 
trust and obedience toward the 
33 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

Father, and unselfish love and help- 
fulness toward one another; for not 
competition but self-denying love is 
the law of family life. The strong 
brother, if he be a true brother, shares 
the gains of his superior strength 
with the weakling; and the principle 
of self-denial which Jesus made 
fundamental in his ideal character 
is the basal law of parenthood. 

To the family, then, — the one 
human institution which is in any 
large degree founded on the princi- 
ples of Jesus' kingdom, — we may 
apply directly the test of survival, 
and thus determine in some degree, 
how far its relations and motives are 
true to human nature. We find that 
the family is the fundamental form 
of all social life and the most endur- 
ing one. Individualism is never the 
first condition of life. One is a 
member of a family first, and 

34 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

becomes a separate individual only by 
reason of the gifts of the family. 
Out of it by expansion, as in the 
patriarchal family and in racial 
nations and religions, or by covenant 
or conquest grow the larger organ- 
izations, such as nations, churches, 
and economic corporations. These 
organizations, founded on some 
other principles than those which 
regulate the family and hold it 
together, come and go on the stage 
of history, but the family remains 
fundamentally the same. Physical 
force, law and penalty, individual 
rights and freedom, or commercial 
interests have never proven so true to 
the nature and needs of man as to be 
able to make the institutions founded 
on them permanent. Nay, more! 
Other institutions are able to main- 
tain themselves while they last largely 
by the aid of the reserve power of 

35 



JESUS OF NAZAltETH 

the family motives. A tottering 
nation seeks to support itself by ap- 
pealing to its citizens' love of home, 
and recruits its armies in crises from 
those to whom patriotism means the 
defense of hearth and family. The 
church feels secure as long as its roots 
are in the home; as long as fathers 
and mothers are its recruiting agents. 
It makes its strongest appeals to 
family interests, when it exhorts a 
man to be religious in order to pre- 
serve the family name from disgrace ; 
in order to be true to parents' hopes 
or worthy of a woman's love, or pre- 
pared to meet the loved and lost in the 
life beyond the grave. On the other 
hand, that church or nation which at- 
tacks the family with monastic ideals 
or communistic practices is doomed 
early to perish. Judged by its power 
to survive, the family is truest to the 
spiritual nature and needs of man. 

36 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

And this fact sets the seal of truth 
upon Jesus' teaching that the ideal 
and eternal form of human society 
will be attained in the relations of a 
universal family. 



3T 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE HISTORICAL BASIS IN 
THE FAMILY OF ISRAEL. 

In another way we may apply the 
test of survival. Ideas and institu- 
tions are most likely to prove true 
and lasting which have a definite 
basis in history. Men cannot go up 
into the mount of speculation for 
something entirely new and detached 
from previous experience, and then 
bring down such a pattern and make 
it live and work among men. The 
best that can be done is to advance a 
step along the line of past achieve- 
ments or try on a universal scale 
something worked out by a small 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

people or in a limited field. The con- 
stitution of the United States has 
worked so well because the framers 
of it kept so closely to the principles 
and forms developed by the English 
people in their long progress toward 
popular government, and found 
practicable by the colonists in the 
freer conditions of life in America. 
It gives confidence, therefore, in the 
teaching of Jesus, when we find that 
it rests solidly upon the history and 
religious development of the Jewish 
people; that he himself consciously 
undertook but a larger fulfilment, 
not a destruction, of that which had 
gone before. We find that the Jews 
were in many senses a family nation* 
More than any other civilized people, 
unless it be the Chinese, family loy- 
alty dominated them. Even Solomon 
could not obliterate their tribal dis- 
tinctions in the interest of a firmer 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

national organization. Their national 
consciousness was that they were the 
children of Abraham and Israel. 
They thought in the categories of 
family relations. The suburbs of 
Jerusalem were her "daughters." A 
peaceable man was a "son of peace;" 
a wise man, a "son of wisdom." Jew- 
ish ethics, as interpreted by their 
greatest teachers, the prophets, were 
the virtues and obligations of the 
family enlarged in scope; and they 
expressed their religion in the lan- 
guage of the family. Jehovah was 
to them the husband or father of the 
nation. The covenant which was the 
beginning of their religion' was the 
people's betrothal to Jehovah; and 
their sins were unfaithfulness and 
adultery toward Him. 

The world's master thinkers and 
writers are such because in them the 
truth, worked out in some great epoch 

40 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

of human history, has found perman- 
ent artistic expression. Thus Homer 
immortalized the life and spirit of 
the early Hellenes; Dante expressed 
in his Divine Comedy the dominating 
beliefs of the Middle Ages; Shakes- 
peare became the poet of English 
Feudalism; and Milton, of the Ren- 
aissance Puritanism. Thus Goethe's 
Faust expresses in classic form the 
noble, but wild unrest of the eigh- 
teenth century. In like manner 
Jesus' teaching as to the kingdom of 
God rests upon the historic basis of 
Jewish life and ideals. The prin- 
ciples that held the Jews together he 
extended to include all men. Altho 
the Jews would not follow him into 
this universal fellowship; altho they 
could not entertain the idea of ad- 
mitting the hated Gentiles to share 
the blessings of the family and God 
of Abraham, think how their limited 
4i 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

adoption of the principles of family 
life among themselves has given per- 
manency to their race ! One would not 
expect to find to-day a living member 
of one of the nations that were 
neighbors to the ancient Hebrews. 
Where would one look to-day for an 
Edomite, Assyrian, or Philistine? 
Yet you may find on the street to-day 
in almost any city of the world the 
hooked nose and olive complexion of 
the pure-blooded Jew. For two 
thousand years the Jews have main- 
tained their numbers and racial 
identity, without the asylum of a 
common country, deprived of the 
protection of a political government, 
exposed to the religious hate and 
covetous envy of their Gentile neigh- 
bors, scattered among nations that 
have afflicted and robbed them. If 
their partial realization of the rela- 
tions and motives which Jesus taught 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

has thus enabled them to survive, how 
true must these be to the nature of 
man, and how much more might we 
expect the kingdom of Jesus to be 
eternal! 



43 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE ABILITY TO 
CONVINCE. 

In a third way we may apply the 
test of survival to the teaching of 
Jesus. We may judge of its truth 
by its ability to stand the test of 
criticism and win the assent of men. 
Euclid's geometrical propositions are 
still held to be true, because his rea- 
soning and his demonstrations have 
always convinced men that his propo- 
sitions are true to the laws of thought 
and to the relations of objects in 
space. In a similar way the teach- 
ing of Jesus has secured the assent 
of men. This is the element of truth 

44 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

in the Roman Church's test of 
"universality." It is not a test that 
can be applied in any limited fashion. 
Prophets and geniuses are usually so 
far in advance of their age that they 
are but partially recognized as her- 
alds of truth. Great thinkers and 
teachers have too often to appeal 
from the judgment of their own 
generation to that of generations to 
come. On the other hand a too lim- 
ited application of the principle might 
seem to prove the truth of any system 
of belief that obtains wide accept- 
ance, such as Mohammedanism or 
Medieval demonology. Yet even in 
such cases as these the principle holds 
in part, since no conception ever ob- 
tains wide acceptance among men 
that does not contain large elements 
of truth, which, rather than its limita- 
tions and errors, secure its acceptance. 
The real value of the test proposed 

45 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

is expressed in Abraham Lincoln's 
famous saying that it is impossible 
"to fool all the people all the time." 
In spite of the fact that Jesus' own 
generation largely rejected him, he 
has been able to convince men of all 
ages who have given his teachings 
candid thought and have tested it in 
the laboratory of spiritual experience. 
This is all the more wonderful since 
he never formulated his message into 
a system nor wrote it out in a treatise. 
He dropped his teaching in discon- 
nected discourses among the multi- 
tudes or uttered it in fragmentary 
form in parables and proverbs, which 
were preserved only in the recollec- 
tions of his disciples. Yet in this form 
it has stood the test of the most care- 
ful scrutiny for two thousand years; 
by minds both candid and hostile ; by 
minds as diverse and keen as the 
Greeks, Romans, Medieval scholas- 

46 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

tics, and modern scientific scholars. 
Its truth and convincing power were 
never better shown than in the fact 
that to-day the cry of the world's 
scholarship, understanding as it does, 
the teaching of Jesus more thor- 
oughly than any previous age, is 
"Back to Christ." 



47 



CHAPTER X. 

THE SATISFACTION OF 

PERMANENT HUMAN 

NEEDS. 

Let us apply still another test to 
the teaching of Jesus, — the satisfac- 
tion of permanent human needs. Mr. 
Balfour in his "Foundations of 
Belief" lays this down as one of the 
fundamental bases of belief. We be- 
lieve those things to be true, he main- 
tains, which in practical life bring us 
the satisfaction of our needs. In 
spite of theoretic difficulties we hold 
fast to those ideas which work in 
practise; and on the other hand, no 
theory, however plausible it may be 

48 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

from a speculative point of view, is 
seriously accepted as true unless 
those who act upon it find that it 
brings them into harmonious contact 
with reality. 

The history of human thought is 
filled with the names of men who have 
won distinction by giving clear ex- 
pression to some phase of truth as it 
appeared to their own age, but whose 
opinions have proven false or inade- 
quate in the experience of succeeding 
ages. Others there are who have so 
thoroughly grasped some vital truth 
and given it so exact a statement that 
it answers for all ages. To which 
class does Jesus belong? There are 
those who assert that the unique value 
of Jesus' teaching passed away with 
the progress of the nineteenth cen- 
tury; that the new thought- world in 
which we live has out-dated him. The 
case is stated somewhat in these 

49 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

terms: We live in a world very dif- 
ferent from that assumed in his 
teaching. We no longer regard the 
earth as flat nor as the central body 
in the universe. We have outgrown 
the superstitious belief in angels and 
devils which he shared with his Jew-, 
ish contemporaries. Jewish Messian- 
ism with its cataclysmic ideas of 
history, its crass and artificial notions 
of spiritual events, its other-worldli- 
ness and supernaturalism, is a dead 
system of thought; yet it is the sys- 
tem which is presupposed in his 
teaching. Even the Greek philoso- 
phy in terms of which his followers 
first interpreted him and his message 
to the non- Jewish world is no longer 
regarded as an adequate expression 
of truth. A new world has dawned 
upon the minds of men, of which 
Jesus never thought, much less 
taught ; and with this new world there 

50 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

has come a host of new problems 
about which he had nothing to say 
and in which he can give the world 
no help. Moreover, we are told, it 
is absurd to think that a peasant of 
ancient Judea, an unlettered man 
from one of the least significant pro- 
vinces of the ancient world should be 
the ideal person, and the teacher of 
final truth to the twentieth century. 
This view demands our careful 
attention. From its consideration we 
may, first of all, eliminate the 
matters of time, place, and size. 
Truth and character are spiritual 
realities and therefore not to be 
measured in terms of space and time, 
albeit we Americans are sometimes 
tempted to believe that bigness may 
make up for deficiencies of character 
or truth. Whether a hog existed 
yesterday or two thousand years ago 
has nothing to do with its hoggish- 

51 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

ness; nor would it change its char- 
acter for it to be the size of an 
elephant. Nero is neither more nor 
less of a tyrannical character because 
he was tyrant of the Roman world 
instead of tyrant of Syracuse. The 
size of a country has nothing to do 
with the truth of a man's teaching 
who happens to be born in it. Greece 
and Holland are not much larger 
than Judea; yet no one has seen fit 
to doubt the correctness of Phidias' 
art nor to discount Grotius' princi- 
ples of international law because 
these men lived in time long past or 
in countries so small. Seiior Barbossa 
of Brazil, in an eloquent plea for the 
right of small nations to furnish 
judges for the world's court at the 
Hague, calls attention to the fact 
that the greatest lawgivers of the 
world, Moses and Solon, came from 
among little peoples. The greatest 

52 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

contributions to the underlying prin- 
ciples of our civilization have been 
made by four small countries and 
mostly in ancient times — Judea, 
Greece, the city of Rome, and Eng- 
land. The question of the truth of 
a man's teaching must be, then, not 
one of time, place, or size, but one of 
fact. We must ask, "Did this man 
tell the world the relations of things 
as they are? Did he show men the 
permanent laws and forces of life?" 
Some things are true in one genera- 
tion, which are not true in another, 
because in the progress of history the 
facts change. A teacher who calls 
attention to such things is not a per- 
manent teacher of men, except as the 
historian of an order that has passed 
away. Other things are as perman- 
ent as the universe itself, and those 
who discover and proclaim these per- 
manent realities are teachers of all 

53 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

ages. To the latter class belongs 
Euclid. He set forth the relations of 
lines and. points in space as they are; 
and until the constitution of the uni- 
verse changes so that these relations 
are no longer as he taught them, he 
will remain the world's final teacher 
of geometry, as far as his teaching 
goes. To which class does Jesus be- 
long? Did he tell the truths concern- 
ing man's relations to man and to 
God as they are ideally and etern- 
ally? Did he show the unchanging 
laws and forces of the spiritual life? 
Have the relations and needs of men 
so changed in the twentieth century 
that his teaching is no longer true to 
the facts nor satisfying to man's 
spiritual needs? 

It must be recognized at the outset 
that Jesus did not give teaching 
about a host of problems which we 
find of interest. Modern philosophy 

54 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

raises the question of the existence 
and character of the "thing-in-itself " 
apart from our apprehension of it. 
Jesus never considered the question. 
None of his recorded utterances dis- 
cusses problems of Old Testament 
criticism. He does not tell us the 
date of Deuteronomy, the author of 
Job, or whether Jonah is a history or 
a parable. Is a monarchy or a demo- 
cracy the right form of government? 
What proportion of the gains of in- 
dustry should go to capital and what 
to labor? Are the nebular hypo- 
thesis and theory of organic evolu- 
tion true? Jesus does not tell us. 
But while he does not give answers to 
so many of the problems that press 
for solution upon the modern mind, 
he does, nevertheless, speak of those 
things that still constitute the great 
interests and minister to the supreme 

55 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

needs of modern life.* If the scholar 
of the twentieth century may not go 
to him to solve problems of nature 
and history, he does still need to 
learn from him the spirit that should 
actuate him in his work and deter- 
mine his attitude to his fellows. Too 
often the halls of learning resound 
with acrimonious debates, with sel- 
fish claims of priority of discovery, 
and with bitter charges of dishonest 
methods. Too often we find men 
pursuing the world's mysteries with 
irreverent feet, bent on gain or fame, 
with little thought of the good of 
men or the praise of God. The world 
of scholarship has not outgrown the 
need to sit at Jesus' feet and learn 
the lessons of unselfish devotion to 
truth, of humility, and of love. Jesus 
gave no teaching on the economic 



*Much of the rest of this section was suggested 
by Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, Chapter XIV. 

56 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

laws of wealth and its accumulation; 
but he does teach the truth which the 
modern world so sorely needs to 
know, — that it does not pay to sacri- 
fice one's higher self to gain even the 
whole wealth of the world. Jesus 
does not prescribe one form of gov- 
ernment as best for men; but he 
does teach by precept and example 
that governments must exist for the 
common good, and that those who 
rule must serve, Jesus does not give 
rules for fixing the prices men may 
charge for the output of the fac- 
tories ; but he does assert the supreme 
worth of the men, women and chil- 
dren who tend the machines. He 
wrote no treatise, to be sure, on the 
construction of ships or the operation 
of a wireless telegraph; but he does 
tell us what we still need to be 
taught, that the ship when built must 
go on errands of mercy, not of de- 

57 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

struction; that the message sent by 
wireless must be a message of justice 
and love r not one of hate or war. 
With all modern discoveries and 
achievements in medicine and sur- 
gery, — splendid and beneficent as 
they are, — men have discovered no 
surgery for a broken heart, no balm 
for a sin-sick soul, no antidote for 
sensuality's creeping death other 
than those taught by the great soul- 
physician of Nazareth. And while 
human nature remains what it is and 
has been since recorded history began, 
as long as men love and hate, sin and 
repent, and feel after God, so long 
will the teaching of Jesus be needed 
to show them that God is not far 
from any and to point out the way to 
Him. As long as God and the soul 
endure as they are, so long will Jesus 
remain the satisfier of the soul's 
needs, the final spiritual teacher of 
the world. 

58 



CHAPTER XL 

THE HEIGHT OF THE 
PEDESTAL. 

Let us now turn from the teach- 
ing to the personality of Jesus. 
Christianity has always made him 
rather than his teaching alone central 
in its thought. What value must we 
attach to his personality as a force in 
history? Is his teaching incidental to 
his character or an essential expres- 
sion of it? How shall we account for 
him as a figure and force in history? 

In order to get a true estimate of 
his personal power, it is needful to 
distinguish between it and the advan- 
tage given him by the historical set- 

59 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

ting of his life. Sometimes in 
approaching a city or park one 
catches a glimpse of a statue over- 
topping the trees or houses. Often 
it is impossible to tell how tall the 
figure really is until one can see the 
pedestal on which it stands; for the 
apparent height may be due in reality 
to the height of the pedestal. So in 
determining the actual greatness of 
an historic character one must know 
first of all how much of his ap- 
parent greatness and power are 
due to his environment and other 
favoring circumstances. Attention 
has already been called to the rela- 
tive insignificance of the country 
of Jesus. Judea was lacking in 
nearly all those resources which 
enable a people to play an influential 
part in history. A little backbone of 
limestone mountains stretching be- 
tween a harborless coast and an 

60 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

impassable desert, without great 
rivers, without population sufficient 
to form a conquering army, without 
mineral or agricultural resources, its 
capital a mere mountain fortress "on 
the road to nowhere," it had little 
chance to furnish one of its citizens 
with resources, either military, politi- 
cal, or economic, with which to influ- 
ence the world.* Had Alexander 
been born in Abyssinia, away from 
Greek culture and Philip's phalanx, 
what likelihood is there that he would 
be called great? If Napoleon had 
been a citizen of some petty native 
province of India at the foot of the 
Himalayas on the far frontier of the 
British Empire, how much chance 
would he have had to play the part 
he did or any great part in the history 
of civilization? Yet in such a despised 



*See G. A. Smith, The Historical Geography of 
the Holy Land. 

61 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

province on the far frontier of the 
Roman Empire Jesus was born. 
What he accomplished was achieved 
without any of the usual aids to 
power. He had neither wealth, 
learning, political organization, nor 
army with which to impress the world. 
In outward significance his life was 
like the mustard seed of his own par- 
able. An obscure peasant of Gali- 
lee, — regarded as provincial even by 
his own nation, — he taught a few 
years, chiefly in the outlying districts 
of Palestine; gathered a few fisher- 
folk about him, who dreamed he was 
the Messiah that so persistently 
haunted the hopes of this strange 
people; aroused a transient interest 
among the Jews by his strange teach- 
ing and reputed cures; incurred the 
hate and fear of the rulers and lead- 
ers by his opposition to the conven- 
tional religion and by his sporadic 

62 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

popularity, and was put to death in 
disgraceful fashion by the conniv- 
ance of Jewish and Roman authori- 
ties. If such a one made any 
impression on the world, it was by the 
sheer force of his personality and by 
the weight of his teaching. 

There is one scene in his life that 
makes his independence of circum- 
stances stand out with peculiar force. 
It was after the multitudes had 
turned away from him because he 
refused to be forced into a Messianic 
revolution just after the feeding of 
the five thousand near Capernaum. 
He had retired to the neighborhood 
of Caesarea Philippi with his twelve 
disciples, tho still uncertain of their 
loyalty. Here he finalty dared ask 
them whom they believed him to be; 
and there Peter, for them all, con- 
fessed they still held him to be the 
Messiah, the Son of the Living 

63 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

God. Hard by where this confession 
was made, stood the marble temple 
in honor of Augustus which Herod 
Philip had erected to his imperial 
patron.* Well might the provincials 
of the empire worship the numen of 
the emperor, for he seemed to them 
greater than their old national deities 
had been thought to be. He had the 
gifts of peace and justice and pros- 
perity, the power of life and death in 
his hands. Which of these think you 
as you watch the scene, is the greater, 
the more divine: Augustus, the 
founder of the world-wide empire, 
with all power in his hands and all 
things in his gift, the incarnation 
of the world's ideal of peace, order, 
and law, whom the provincials wor- 
ship in the marble temple as the 
greatest manifestation they know of 
divine power? Or Jesus of Naza- 

* G. A. Smith, Hist. Geography of the Holy Land. 
64 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

reth, without power of office or place, 
fleeing from the indifference and 
hostility of his own people, alone 
except for the little band of unlet- 
tered Galileans who still think him 
the Messiah of God? Which will be 
most potent five centuries afterward, 
the empire of Caesar or the kingdom 
of Jesus? Certainly there is no 
promise in the outward circumstances 
of that scene that Jesus will supplant 
Caesar on the world's throne. Yet 
you know, student of history, that 
when three centuries had passed, cen- 
turies of struggle even unto blood 
between the followers of the Christ 
and the soldiers of Caesar, Constan- 
tine sat upon the imperial throne with 
the labarum over him, and that he 
was placed there by the followers of 
Jesus. And when five centuries had 
passed the bishop of Rome exercised 
in the name of Jesus, the authority 

65 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

of the Caesars after their dominion 
had perished. What was there in 
Jesus that, tho dead, he should thus 
rule the world on the ruins of 
Caesar's throne! Whatever it was 
that gave him such power, it was not 
the pedestal on which he stood. 



66 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE MEASURE OF A MAN. 

Next in our endeavor to get a true 
estimate of Jesus' personality, let us 
apply to him the measure of a man. 
When looking at a photograph of an 
ancient statue, it is difficult to get a 
correct idea of its size unless one 
knows the scale and perspective of 
the picture. It is common in photo- 
graphing such an object to have a 
man stand beside it to give a standard 
of size. Likewise it is hard to get a 
true scale of measurement for char- 
acters of history, because they may be 
magnified or dwarfed by distance, 
contemporary characters, or by the 

67 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

imagination of succeeding ages. 
Some men loom large in history for 
lack of great men near them to reveal 
their real insignificance. Let us 
measure the personality of Jesus by 
placing alongside him two men who 
were his contemporaries; and, to be 
absolutely fair, let us take two men 
who were spiritual giants, of his own 
nation, and standing one on each side 
of him in the order of their historical 
appearance. 

There is first John the Baptist, 
who, Jesus himself said, was the 
greatest of all the prophets ; nay even, 
the greatest of the sons of women up 
to his own time. John came to a 
people long without the voice of 
prophecy, to an age religiously proud 
and self-satisfied. Yet he stirred 
the pulses of that crystallized age as 
Jewry has not been stirred for cen- 
turies, and convinced the self -right- 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

eous people, confident of their 
Abrahamic blood, that they must 
repent of their sins or they would 
never see the kingdom of God. He 
brought the masses of the Jews out 
to the Jordan to his baptism of 
repentance, and even smoked out the 
complacent Pharisees with his predic- 
tions of the fires of judgment, until 
that "brood of vipers" was ready to 
flee from the imminent Messianic 
wrath. The leaders paid him the 
highest tribute by asking him 
whether he were not himself the 
Messiah. He rebuked Herod the 
tetrarch of Galilee for his adulterous 
marriage with Herodias, and made 
him tremble for his throne, fearful 
lest John should absolve the people 
from their allegiance. Herod did 
not feel himself secure until John 
was in prison, and the ambitious 
Herodias could not rest until he was 

69 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

dead. His influence was so lasting 
that twenty-five years after his death 
there were disciples of John in 
Ephesus who had not heard of Jesus ; 
and at the end of the first Christian 
century the writer of the Fourth Gos- 
pel found it necessary to deny that 
John was the Messiah. Yet this 
stern convicter of hearts acknowl- 
edged it more fitting that Jesus 
should baptize him than that he 
should baptize Jesus, claimed to be 
unworthy to bear Jesus' sandals, and 
turned his own disciples to him as the 
expected Messiah. The influence of 
Jesus so speedily assimilated John's 
work and eclipsed him that the world 
has never realized how great the Bap- 
tist was. 

On the other side of Jesus is the 
intense and commanding personality 
of Saul of Tarsus; a born leader of 
men, everywhere dividing them into 

70 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

those that followed him with intense 
loyalty and those who feared him 
with intense hate. He was too great 
to remain a consistent Pharisee. He 
could not look on while men were 
undermining the religion that to him 
was the only hope of eternal life and 
say with the "laissez-faire" spirit of 
his master Gamaliel, "If this be of 
God, we do not want to be found 
opposing it, and if it be of men it 
will come to naught anyhow, so that 
we need not bother about it." He 
held the clothes of the men who 
stoned Stephen and plunged at once 
into a persecution of extermination 
against Christianity. He was great 
enough to change his beliefs at the 
call of truth, and showed in his 
Christian apostleship the same daunt- 
less zeal that he had shown in his 
Pharisaism. He freed the gospel 
from its Jewish swaddling-clothes 

71 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

and proclaimed it in its freedom and 
universality. He completely over- 
shadowed the original twelve apos- 
tles. He put the impress of his 
experience and thinking so firmly 
upon Christian theology that it has 
been predominantly Pauline to this 
day. Handicapped by being a 
despised Jew, and by the doctrine of 
a crucified Messiah, "to the Jews a 
stumbling-block and to the Greeks 
foolishness/' he went forth to win the 
Roman world. It was not among 
the credulous and unlearned rural 
populations, and in the frontier 
provinces, that he sought his fields, 
but in the very centers of Graeco- 
Roman civilization. He worked a 
year in Antioch, three years in Ephe- 
sus, two years in Corinth, and two in 
Rome; and by the force of his per- 
sonality he so planted his gospel in 
these capitals that the power of the 

72 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

Caesars thru two centuries of perse- 
cution could not root it up. 

Yet this giant, when he met with 
the spirit of Jesus, instantly put him- 
self at his service and asked for 
orders. Thereafter the superlative 
Pharisee called himself the chief of 
sinners, and was proud to sign him- 
self the slave of Jesus. For him he 
abandoned all that had been his pride 
and hope, his consuming passion 
being henceforth to attain to the goal 
of the upward calling of God in 
Christ Jesus. Thus it is that Jesus 
appears beside his greatest contem- 
poraries, and like some sun draws the 
mightiest of them from their courses 
to revolve as satellites about him. 



73 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE NAME ABOVE EVERY 
NAME. 

Jesus 5 influence over men consti- 
tutes another measure of his great- 
ness. Just as astronomers seek to 
determine the magnitude of some 
comet by noting its pull upon the 
planets and their satellites, so we may- 
get some idea of the power of Jesus 
as we observe his influence on those 
with whom he came in contact. We 
have already seen his influence on 
John the Baptist and on Paul. We 
have also seen how the Twelve clung 
to the belief that he was the Messiah, 
when appearances were all to the con- 

74 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

trary; even tho he had failed to do 
what they expected of the Messiah; 
altho his own nation had rejected 
him; and altho he had told them his 
career was to end in a disgraceful 
death which was to their minds no 
part of the Messiah's destiny. They 
kept the belief because they could 
account for his personal power and 
character on no other supposition 
than that he was the Messiah. And 
we note this same tendency in all who 
came to know Jesus intimately: to 
feel that nothing short of their 
greatest word could adequately 
describe him. To that section of the 
Jews which shared the Messianic 
hope, there was no greater word than 
Messiah, which might be applied to 
anyone in the likeness of man. But 
when any of these came to know 
Jesus they persisted in calling him the 
Christ even tho at the cost of suff er- 

75 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

ing and death* The author of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews, writing to 
Jews of Sadducean tendencies, to 
whom the temple cultus with its 
priesthood was greater than the Mes- 
sianic hope, describes Jesus by the 
greatest word they know: Jesus is 
the great High Priest, and to make it 
superlative, "the high priest forever 
after the order of Melchizedek." 
When the writer of the Fourth Gos- 
pel wishes to describe Jesus to men 
of Hellenistic mind, who have specu- 
lated of possible divine "words" that 
should reveal the unknown deity, he 
calls Jesus the "Word" who declares 
in human flesh the unseen God. 
When the Nicene fathers undertook 
to formulate in a phrase what they 
felt Jesus to be, they knew no name 
that was adequate, except "the name 
that is above every name," and so 
wrote in their creed that he was "very 

76 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

God of very God." Thus we gather 
from the names they gave him how 
great was the impression Jesus made 
on the first generations of his fol- 
lowers. 



77 



CHAPTER XIV. 

PITTED AGAINST THE 
RABBIS. 

Some impression of the intellectual 
power of Jesus has been gained 
from the consideration of the truth 
and originality of his teaching. 
Another measure of it is found in 
the scenes of Tuesday of Passion 
Week, when he measured wits with 
the trained minds of the Rabbis. The 
intellectual power which he displayed 
was due mainly to his native ability, 
since he had not the advantage of 
extensive study in the schools. The 
Jewish leaders had decided to arrest 
Jesus, but found an obstacle in the 

78 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

crowds that had saluted him as Mes- 
siah during the Triumphal Entry, 
and which still hung upon his words 
and were loyal to his person. Till 
these were alienated from him, to 
arrest him meant to provoke a riot 
which would bring down Pilate's 
legions upon them and mar the feast 
of the passover with a bloody mas- 
sacre. So the leaders undertook to 
discredit Jesus before the crowds, so 
that the latter would turn away from 
him and leave them free to dispose 
of him as they listed. It seemed an 
easy matter to make this simple- 
minded provincial say some foolish, 
blasphemous, or seditious thing. So 
the contest of wits between Jesus and 
the best trained minds of Judaism, 
sharpened by malice, began and con- 
tinued thruout the day. 

First, they asked him for his 
authority to teach. It was customary 

79 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

for men, who were deemed compe- 
tent, to be publicly authorized as 
rabbis. They expected Jesus to con- 
fess in confusion that he had never 
been ordained as a rabbi, and then 
they would be able to shame the 
crowds for attaching importance to 
the mouthings of an unlettered 
upstart. To their demand for his 
authority, Jesus replied with a 
counter-question: Was John the 
Baptist a prophet of God or no? 
Now this was not a mere subterfuge. 
Had they been sincere, it would have 
put them on the way to the truth 
about him. But they were not sin- 
cere, and as they thought it over, they 
found it was not Jesus but themselves 
who were embarrassed by their ques- 
tion. If they should answer that 
John was a true prophet, then Jesus 
would remind them that John had 
called him the Messiah. If on the 

80 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

other hand, they said, what they 
really believed, that John was not a 
true prophet, they would discredit 
themselves with the multitude, for 
the masses firmly believed that John 
was sent of God. The result was 
that these professed oracles and 
religious leaders of God's chosen 
people publicly professed that they 
could not tell whether or no a man 
like the Baptist spoke by the Spirit 
of God. 

Then the Pharisees and Herodians 
came together. They asked Jesus 
whether it was right to pay tribute to 
Caesar. If he should answer that it 
was lawful to pay the tribute, the 
crowd of Galilean zealots, whose 
loyalty to Jesus stood in the way of 
the leaders' purpose, would turn 
against him; for it was the funda- 
mental tenet in the zealot platform, 
that the Jews had no king but 

81 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

Jehovah and were cowards if after 
God they paid tribute to any man. 
If, on the other hand, Jesus should 
say it was wrong to pay the tribute, 
the Herodians would report to Pilate 
that the Galilean prophet was stir- 
ring up sedition, and Pilate would 
know how to deal effectually with 
treason against Caesar. It was a 
dangerous dilemma, and on one horn 
or the other of it they felt sure Jesus 
would be caught. In reply he asked 
them to show him the tribute money, 
and one of them drew from the 
bosom of his tunic the denarius bear- 
ing the name and image of Tiberius. 
Now the fact that these Pharisees 
had Caesar's money in their pockets, 
showed that they had assumed obliga- 
tions to Caesar and betrayed their 
hypocrisy. Pretending to have scru- 
ples against acknowledging the rights 
of the Gentile government, they 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

nevertheless availed themselves of it 
whenever it served their selfish 
interests to do so. They traded with 
Caesar's money, took advantage of 
the Roman peace to ply their trades 
in security, and appealed to the 
Roman government against injustice 
on the part of even their own coun- 
trymen. "Therefore," said Jesus, 
"since you have thus put yourselves 
under obligations to Caesar, render 
to him what is due him in return, and 
do not at the same time forget to pay 
what you owe to God for his benefits 
to you." And thus Jesus escaped the 
snare by making a clear and simple 
distinction as to men's duties. 

Next came the Sadducees and 
sought to show how simple-minded 
Jesus was for believing in the resur- 
rection. They cited a case, such as 
might easily arise under the Pente- 
teuchal laws, of seven men who had 



JJESUS OF NAZARETH 

had the same wife in succession, and 
asked him whose wife she would be 
in the resurrection. Now the chief 
quality of the trained mind is its 
ability to make fine distinctions. The 
untrained usually think in masses and 
extremes. To a child, you must be 
bad if you are not good; the thing 
that is not white must be black. It 
is an evidence of culture when men 
begin to recognize the infinite grada- 
tion of grays thru which white shades 
into black, and to know the varying 
degrees of goodness and badness that 
may be mixed in the same character. 
The difficulty of the Sadducees' ques- 
tion lay in the ridiculousness of a 
certain conception of the resurrection 
life, which seemed to make belief in 
any kind of resurrection altogether 
untenable. But Jesus makes the dis- 
tinction, such as is always harder to 
make in controversy than when in a 

84 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

judicial frame of mind, between the 
false assumption and the actual truth. 
They assumed that the resurrection 
is a simple resumption of the relations 
and conditions of this life. This, 
Jesus tells them, is a mistake. In 
the future life all will be spiritual; 
and marriage, which is an institution 
for replenishing a mortal race, will 
be no longer needed, "for neither can 
they die any more." But that there 
is a real resurrection life Jesus proves 
to these Sadducees from the only part 
of the Old Testament which they 
admit as authoritative, — the Pente- 
teuch. He meets them on their own 
ground and shows them that the 
religious relation to God involves 
continued life, since "God is not the 
God of dead men but of living, for 
all live unto Him." 

After the discomfiture of the Sad- 
ducees, one of the scribes came, ask- 

85 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

ing which was the greatest command- 
ment of the law. The trap in the 
question lay in the fact that accord- 
ing to the Jewish view all com- 
mandments of the law were of equal 
importance. They thought God just 
as much concerned to have the sac- 
rificial blood sprinkled on a certain 
Side of the altar as that men should 
observe justice, mercy, and the love 
of God. For Jesus to designate one 
as greater than another would be like 
calling one book of the Bible more 
inspired than another. Jesus replied 
by quoting as the first commandment 
that passage from Deuteronomy with 
which the Shema began in the syna- 
gogue service. The Jews themselves 
had put it first in their study and 
recitation of the law in the syna- 
gogue, since it furnished the motive 
for the observance of the precepts of 
the law. Alongside this, as being 

86 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

like it, Jesus put a passage from 
Leviticus, which includes within its 
motive all precepts of social right- 
eousness. The scribe "saved his 
face" by declaring courteously that 
Jesus had answered well. 

After the scribe had retired no 
more questions were asked ; but Jesus 
adopting their own methods turned 
upon his questioners. Assuming the 
Messianic character and Davidic 
authorship of Psalm 110, as all his 
hearers did without question, he 
asked how it was that David called 
the Messiah "Lord," if he were his 
son. It was almost unthinkable for 
a Jewish father to call his son, 
"Lord." This question they were 
unwilling or unable to answer, since 
it led to the conclusion that the Mes- 
siah was something more than a mere 
son of David after the flesh, more 
than merely a political successor. 

87 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

This day of conflict, begun by the 
leaders in order to discredit Jesus 
before the multitudes and "take him 
in his talk," ended with the Rabbis 
baffled and silenced. Jesus had come 
off victorious in the dangerous play 
of words, and with terrific denuncia- 
tions of their insincerity and spiritual 
incompetence, he swept them out of 
the temple and remained undisputed 
master of the situation. He was an 
intellectual giant. 



88 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE POISE OF HIS CHAR- 
ACTER. 

The spiritual power of Jesus, 
which has always been perceived 
more fully than his intellectual 
power, is seen best in the poise of his 
character and in his ability to touch 
the consciences of men. The eff ect- 
iveness of power is determined by its 
control and application. A powerful 
engine would soon knock itself to 
pieces without a governor. Great 
spiritual power cannot exist except in 
diffused and self-destructive forms 
unless accompanied by self-control 
and concentration. There is a repose 

89 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

in the characters of men that is due 
to the absence of personal force, but 
the poise of Jesus' character was due 
to his self-control. He was complete 
master of his powers so that he con- 
centrated his energies effectively on 
the supreme purposes of his life. 

We find this manifest first, in his 
physical endurance. It was not the 
indifference of those incapable of 
suffering, nor the stoicism of hard- 
ened natures, but that endurance of 
pain for higher ends which is the 
essence of all moral heroism. For 
evidence of Jesus' physical courage 
and endurance we turn inevitably to 
the scene on Golgotha. It is diffi- 
cult for us to-day to imagine the suf- 
ferings inflicted by crucifixion. It 
was a Roman refinement of an 
Assyrian brutality. The victim was 
placed so that the agonies of the nail 
wounds would be freshened by every 

90 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

effort to relieve the tortures of an 
unendurable position, until at last the 
victim died of starvation or blood- 
poisoning. In addition to this Jesus 
had been scourged before the cruci- 
fixion and had borne the beam of his 
cross upon his lacerated back until he 
fainted under it. Yet thru the long 
hours upon the cross, his words were 
almost altogether about his mission 
or full of solicitude for those about 
him, — for the soldiers who crucified 
him, for the robber suffering at his 
side, and for his mother in her awful 
bereavement. Only once did a cry 
of physical pain escape him. Those 
who know of the torturing thirst that 
comes from loss of blood to soldiers 
left wounded on the battle-field, will 
not marvel as much at Jesus' cry "I 
thirst," as at the spirit that refused 
the stupefying drink of myrrh. We 
of this generation, who shrink so 

91 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

quickly from the post of the foreign 
missionary and from all other moral 
enterprises that involve danger, dis- 
comfort, or pain ; who take refuge so 
readily from pain in anesthetics and 
anodynes, can understand something 
of the moral power that enabled 
Jesus to suffer so in silence, "for the 
joy that was set before him." The 
Roman centurion who guarded the 
cross was accustomed to see men 
suffer and die; to see then endure 
stoically and die heroically; and yet 
the spirit with which Jesus bore his 
fate made the Roman exclaim 
"Surely this was a son of the gods!" 
There is a yet greater test of a 
man's power over himself than the 
endurance of actual pain. In the 
excitement of battle or the passion of 
conflict men may face danger easily, 
tho they are unable to go in cold- 
blood to certain suffering. The 

93 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

bravest moment in John Bunyan's 
life was when, crouching in Bedford 
jail with the threat of the gallows 
over him, if he did not prove untrue 
to his calling, and fearing he might 
disgrace his Master by going to the 
gallows with white face and tottering 
knees, he still resolved, if need be, to 
leap boldly off the ladder with the 
noose about his neck, "Come heaven, 
come hell." Jesus' greatest courage 
was not that shown on Golgotha, but 
when alone in Gethsemane he faced 
the cross and still held true to his 
Father's will; or when a year before 
the fatal passover he foresaw the 
awful end, and yet kept on his way, 
or even when he set out for Jeru- 
salem, knowing he was on his way to 
death. The twelve were brave men, 
as the world accounts bravery, — 
hardy fishermen who often braved 
the storms of the treacherous lake of 

93 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

Galilee. Their leader, single-handed, 
attacked a Roman cohort in the gar- 
den of Gethsemane. But Mark 
gives us this contrast between Jesus 
and them: "And they were on the 
way, going up to Jerusalem; and 
Jesus was going before them: and 
they were amazed ; and they that fol- 
lowed were afraid." 

A greater manifestation of Jesus' 
power is found in his self-restraint in 
regard to his ministry.* He believed 
himself as the Messiah to be pos- 
sessed of supernatural powers, but 
he refused of set purpose to employ 
his powers for personal advantage. 
He refused to attempt signs from 
heaven to ease the labor of his mis- 
sion ; or to work miracles to lift him- 
self above the common lot; or to 
invoke as a means of escape from 



* Robinson, Studies in the Character of Christ, 
Chapter I. 

94 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

suffering the angelic legions which he 
believed to be at his call in Geth- 
semane. The same self-restraint 
shows itself in connection with his 
work of healing. When he found 
great multitudes of ailing people; 
when he found the porches of Beth- 
esda full of sick- folk, how naturally 
we expect him to heal them every 
one. But he resisted the impulse to 
heal either from love of glory, from 
weakly sentimentalism, or short- 
sighted sympathy. He felt the 
divineness of the natural order ; knew 
the disciplinary value of pain; and 
reserved his power for the blessing of 
men in their highest and completest 
selves. He never healed except for 
the good of the afflicted, — the 
spiritual as well as the physical good. 
Jesus shows a similar self-restraint 
in the patience and perseverance with 
which he pursued his purposes amid 

95 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

the course of events which he could 
only partially control. One of the 
most trying things for men possessed 
by noble enthusiasms is to have to 
work with intractable material; to 
have their plans thwarted by acci- 
dent; and their purposes delay e* 1 
equally by cunning malice and ignor 
ant good-intent. Yet Jesus aston 
ishes us by the equipoise of temper 
with which he pursues his goal; by 
the patience with which he awaits his 
opportunity; by the energy with 
which he avails himself of every 
opening, and by the skill with which 
he turns seeming obstacles to account. 
He refuses to be hastened until his 
hour has come. He accepts event* 
as God's ordering. He goes asid? 
for a day's rest, but finding hungry 
and needy multitudes, makes the day 
one of his busiest, as he feeds the 
thousands, soul and body. Opposi- 

96 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

tion drives him from one field only 
to send him to one more fertile. 
When the hostility of the Pharisees 
drives him from Judea, he devotes 
himself to the training of the twelve ; 
ar d the treachery of Judas brings 
h n to the triumphant sacrifice of his 
cross. 



3T 



CHAPTER XVI. 

HIS POWER TO TOUCH THE 
CONSCIENCE. 

Jesus' spiritual power was not only 
sufficient to keep his own conscience 
clear, but to quicken the consciences 
of others. John the Baptist had 
preached repentance and had been 
wonderfully successful in piercing 
the armor of his people's self-com- 
placency. But when Jesus began to 
preach the same message, he soon out- 
stripped John in the numbers he 
brought to him confessing their sins. 
Those who have devoted themselves 
to the task of stirring the feeble 
moral consciousness of men into a 

98 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

realization of their sinfulness, know 
what a task it is. But there is a 
harder task; after men have been led 
to see themselves in the blaze of 
divine holiness, and so to know their 
sinfulness; after they have had their 
pride broken so that they are ready to 
confess their weaknesses and sins, 
then to lift them up in hope and make 
them believe it is still possible for 
them to become victorious over sin, 
and live lives honorable in the sight 
of men and useful in the service of 
God, — this is the harder task. Yet 
this Jesus was strong to do. He 
made Peter cry out, "Depart from 
me for I am a sinful man, O Lord"; 
but he led Peter to forsake all and 
follow him. Jesus' look broke 
Peter's heart and sent him out of 
Caiaphas' palace to weep bitterly; 
but it also brought him back to Jesus 
by the Lake of Tiberias with his pro- 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

fession of humble loyalty: "Thou 
knowest that I love thee." He 
touched the conscience of the sinful 
woman so that it burned with her 
shame; but she came to weep in his 
presence, and went from him into 
peace and hope, to sin no more. He 
had the power to call out the highest 
in men. His seemingly impossible 
dreams created a new type of 
spiritual, altruistic character. He 
demanded of men that they be per- 
fect as God is perfect ; that they for- 
give one another as God forgives 
the penitent; that they love one 
another as he loved them; and that 
they take up the cross of utter self- 
abnegation and follow him. No 
other character in history has set 
before men, in example and precept, 
so high an ideal of duty; and no 
other has opened to men such sluices 
of enabling power. From him there 
100 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

has flowed thru the centuries a 
steadily widening stream of personal, 
social, and civic righteousness; 
because weak, erring, common men 
and women in response to his 
demands have come to believe in 
themselves; because his faith in them 
has made them worthy of his trust. 
No other personage has been able to 
arouse such an unselfish enthusiasm 
for humanity. Men admire the work 
of other geniuses, but they do not 
risk their lives to acquaint savages 
and aliens with the tragedies of 
Shakespeare or the philosophy of 
Plato. Jesus has been able so to 
enlist the loyalty of men, that the 
lives of missionaries and reformers 
and martyrs have been the seed of 
his church, and so to direct it, that his 
religion is the religion of humanity. 



101 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THE COSMIC MEANING OF 
HIS CHARACTER. 

Thus far we have been occupied 
with the effort to ascertain the his- 
torical greatness of Jesus. We must 
now try to find an explanation of 
his character and power adequate to 
account for his knowledge of truth, 
the perfection of his character, and 
the potency of his personal influence. 
The explanation of history carries 
us a little way, but stops short of the 
goal of our quest. History con- 
tributes to our understanding of him, 
when it points us to the unique 
religious capacity and spiritual 
102 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

passion of the Hebrew race; to the 
rich heritage of the Old Testament 
literature and institutions that was 
his ; to the pure and tenacious family 
life of the Jews, which gave content 
to his teaching; and to the Messianic 
hope which gave at once the sug- 
gestion of his mission and the inter- 
pretative form to his message. It 
goes further when it calls attention 
to the pious group of men and women 
like Mary and Elizabeth, Zachariah 
and Simeon, from which he sprang; 
and to the exceptional purity of his 
character and spirituality of his 
religious experiences. But all these 
leave us unsatisfied, and we must 
turn from history to philosophy, not 
for the solution of all mysteries, but 
for an estimate of his cosmic signifi- 
cance; for such a correlation of Jesus 
of Nazareth with the thought-world 
in which we live, as to give the mind 

103 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

a resting-place and bring religious 
belief into harmony with experience. 
It is one of the fundamental 
assumptions of all our thinking that 
the effect must be included in the 
cause ; that what is evolved must first 
be involved; or, to put it in the lan- 
guage of common-sense, that some- 
thing cannot be got out of nothing. 
Whether this conviction be true 
absolutely, the philosophers may at 
times dispute, but we cannot think 
without making such an assumption. 
When we find a white-petalled water- 
lily on the surface of a pond, we may 
trace its stem down till its roots dis- 
appear in the black ooze at the bot- 
tom. Now no dexterity of logic can 
convince us that a white lily can come 
out of black mud, unless the white- 
ness of the lily was potentially there 
to begin with; w r e insist that the 
whiteness was there in the seed or in 

104 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

some of the elements out of which it 
grew, before the whiteness could 
appear in the flower. Sometime since, 
application was made for a patent on 
a process for changing certain ores 
of antimony into gold. The Patent 
Office, fearing to become in some 
degree party to a fraud, sent the 
formula to the mint to be tried. The 
answer from the mint was that, if the 
ores in question were treated by the 
process described, a small quantity of 
gold would be obtained, because the 
ores contained a small percentage of 
gold. No way is known as yet to get 
gold in the result, unless it be present 
in the material used. It was this 
same line of reasoning that led a 
prominent English philosopher to say 
that by no known alchemy can we 
get golden conduct out of leaden 
motives. By the same reasoning, 
whatever appears in the course of the 

105 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

world's evolution must be already- 
present in the creative evolving 
causes. If personal intelligence, 
sinlessness, and love appear in the 
cosmic process, it means they belong 
first of all to the Creating Cause of 
the universe. By no alchemy can 
Jesus of Nazareth come out of a 
materialistic or godless universe. 

"A fire-mist and a planet, 

A crystal and a cell; 
A jelly-fish and a saurian, 

And the caves where the cave-men 
dwell : — 
Then a sense of law and beauty, 
And a face turned from the 
sod; — 
Some call it evolution, 
And others call it God." 



106 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE SECRET OF HIS 
POWER. 

The cosmic significance of Jesus, 
then, lies in what he visibly makes 
known of the Personal Spirit who lies 
back of the cosmic process. It is 
also in his relation to the spiritual 
forces of the world that the secret of 
his power is to be sought. On a clear 
summer day one sometimes sees a 
fleecy cloud not bigger than a hand 
stand out for a moment from the blue 
and then vanish into it again.* The 
evanescent cloud is significant only 
because it reveals the facts and forces 



♦Brierly, Ourselves and the Universe, page 300. 
107 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

that produced it; because it is a vis- 
ible indication of the vast flood of 
waters th&t hangs otherwise invisible 
in the air above us; because it shows 
that the air has reached the point of 
saturation and is ready to begin the 
precipitation of cloud or rain. One 
may see at night upon the city streets 
a glowing light hanging from a 
couple of dark wires. Somewhere, 
unseen by the man on the street, 
masses of coal are dazzling white in 
the furnaces and imprisoned steam 
snarls and hisses in the boilers; but 
this power of coal and steam flows 
silent and unseen in the black wires, 
and only the light reveals its pres- 
ence. One might easily think the 
light could be extinguished with the 
hand, but if he should undertake it he 
would encounter the vast force which 
the feeble manifestation of it in the 
light had not prepared him to expect. 

108 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

So the secret of Jesus' power lies in 
the spiritual forces that came to vis- 
ible manifestation in him. His out- 
ward life gave no indication of the 
power behind him. When most of 
his contemporaries saw him, there was 
"no beauty that they should desire 
him/' no pomp of power that they 
should fear him. When he became 
inconvenient to their purposes, they 
thought it easy to silence him. But 
his persistent influence and growing 
power proved a puzzle to Pharisee 
and Sadducee alike. They put him 
to death, but his death seemed but to 
increase his influence. Saul of Tarsus 
undertook to quench Jesus' move- 
ment, thinking it would be easy to 
destroy the despised sect, and then 
Saul received the spiritual shock that 
utterly transformed him. The only 
explanation of what happened to 
him, he could ever give, was to say 

109 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

that "God was in Christ, reconciling 
the world to himself." Jesus' most 
intimate disciples all felt and said, in 
one way or another, the same thing; 
that they came nearest God and felt 
His uplifting power most fully when 
they were with Jesus ; that to see him 
was to see the Father; to know him 
was eternal life. We of the twentieth 
century may not care to use the words 
of the first, but in some terms, any 
adequate explanation of Jesus must 
be virtually the explanation of his 
first interpreters; that in him was 
manifest in terms of human life, the 
holiness, love, and personal power of 
the Universal Character we call God; 
that thru him the spiritual power of 
God most effectually gripped human 
history ; that to know him in spiritual 
fellowship is to be placed in the cir- 
cuit of the world's redemptive forces ; 
is to be driven by the highest motives 

no 



JESUS OF NAZARETH 

toward man's highest ideals; is to 
have life raised to its highest power 
in coordination with the Infinite 
Father. 



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